I am making an app where I need to know
every button that was ever pushed by the user in the app, and when it was pushed, and
where the iPhone has gone (using gps), but there are no cell towers in the area so I can't use that significant location changes method everyone uses.
It seems to me like the Plist method for data saving won't work because I don't want the app to start where it left off, I want it to start at the beginning every time.
Also, if any of you have any idea how I can make my app wake up at certain specific times, and/or how I can make it impossible to exit, that would be awesome. This is for an experiment with the University of Queensland St. Lucio Psych Department and the Grute Eylandt Aborigines.
You can know everything the user does in your app if you want. You could use your own solution with an SQLite database for example, and dispatch the data to a server every once in a while.
The GPS is also easy, you could just track the user with the Core Location framework.
You can't make the app wake at specific times, the best you can do is implement push notifications but it's up to the user to open the app via the notification or by themselves by tapping the app icon on the iPhone home screen.
Otherwise you could set up a local notification just before exiting the application, this is faster and easier to implement then setting up push notifications.
There is also no way to stop the app being closed, that is until iOS 6 comes along with it's accessibility features, you can disable the home button then. But not now.
Related
I would like to build a helper app for gamers, and to build some extra functionality I would like to observe/time certain third party games behaviors, more specifically when the game actually launches the full screen process.
For example: my app is a system tray app, the game has a "launcher" app with lobby and menu screens. Once the game launches the extra process, usually OS X will switch resolutions (optionally) and my App would be notified somehow. Then I can start a timer. Once game match finishes, either the process is closed, or the game is not full screen anymore, my app gets a second notification and I can stop the timer.
Are there official Apple APIs that provide any way to observe/poll for the app going full screen and/or launch additional windows that I can reliably assume it's the actual game screen?
I doubt you're going to find a completely comprehensive solution. There are many ways for apps to achieve a full-screen experience and most don't provide a notification about that fact.
A full-screen app can modify the presentationOptions of NSApplication to hide the Dock and menu bar. Another app can use key-value observing to monitor its application object's currentSystemPresentationOptions property, which will reflect the current system status.
A full-screen app can capture the displays (although Apple discourages this technique). You can try to detect this by calling CGDisplayIsCaptured(), although it's been deprecated since 10.9 with no replacement. It may be possible that, if you register a callback with CGDisplayRegisterReconfigurationCallback(), you'll get called when something captures the display. However, capturing the display is sort of about preventing other processes from noticing such changes, so maybe not. In that case, you'd have to poll. You might also poll for the current display mode; changing the mode is the primary reason why a game would capture the display in the first place.
A full-screen game could also just create a borderless window the size of the screen and set its window level to be in front of the Dock and menu bar (and other apps' windows). There's not really a notification about this. You could detect it using the CGWindowList API, but you would have to poll. For example, you could call CGWindowListCopyWindowInfo(kCGWindowListOptionOnScreenOnly, kCGNullWindowID) and iterate through the dictionaries looking for one the size of the screen and at a window level above kCGStatusWindowLevel.
(You might be able to use the Accessibility API to get a notification when the frontmost window changes, so you'd only have to poll when that happens.)
You cannot observe a notification if there is none. So firstly you need to know if the app you want to observe is actually sending a notification that is observable. You cannot 'hook' into other apps without their planned consent.
I'm building a Windows Store app and it pops up toast notifications from time to time. I also have an animation that plays to show when something has updated. Both of these happen at the same time.
What I would like is to not show the toast when the app is running.
So, is there a nice easy way to determine this or do I have to manually track the state via the suspending/resuming events?
Edited info:
The solution has a background task project which goes off, gets the data, then decides if anything has changed that the user needs to know about.
If so, it creates a toast, updates the tile badge, and plays an animation to fade in the new data.
The issue is that I don't want to show the toast and update the tile badge if the user has the app full screen. Similarly, playing the animation isn't needed until the app is resumed (that's the easy part though).
I realize I could solve it by having one timer that works when the app is running, and a separate background task for when it's suspended but that seems like overkill in this case.
The simple answer here is that if your app is suspended, your code won't be running.
If you want to pop up toasts when your app is suspended, you'll either need to use the WPNS or a background task to track changes.
I have a simple app that uses location services, and registers to run in the background. I update a simple tableView with location data. This data is still being received when the user leaves the app and does something else.
Currently I am calling a method in my - (void)applicationWillEnterForeground:(UIApplication *)application to update the UI, but there is still a split second when the app opens, and the UI gets updated.
I have also tried to do periodic UI updates when in the background, but not surprisingly this doesn't seem to work.
Are there any solutions out there so that I can have the UI fully updated when the user brings the app back into the foreground?
The best solution would probably be to profile and see why you have any delay at all before displaying new data. It's quite possible you could do some things to get ready for the display to arrive, like doing Core Data queries ahead of time (they can take a significant amount of time).
An alternative would be to dump a blank UI bitmap from the screen as you were being suspended, and write to it directly based on activity - then when the application resumes, briefly show that bitmap as a screen overlay before showing the real complete UI.
I'm working on an alarm clock application for iOS 4.x. The other alarm clock applications that I've seen are able to present the user with something other than a local notification (i.e., a custom view) and are able to play a sound file. I've been looking into how that's done and have only found this solution:
Play sound with screen turned off / don't let iPhone go to sleep
Is there another approach or is this the best practice?
When your app is not visible, you can't display anything. The silent sound workaround is a cool trick but when a user presses your home button, your app is not visible (and might get destroyed under certain conditions) -> therefore you can't display anything.
So if you tell your user to use your alarm clock by firing it up and then press the sleep button it will work - you can display anything on your screen after the user unlocks the iphone again.
Needless to say that playing sound (even silent sound files) drains the battery so your user might be disappointed if he's not woken up because his iphone has run out of battery.
And yes, there is best practice: Local Notifications! Beginning with iOS 5 it will display your apps icon next to the notification...
I developed an app for IPhone and it's posted to itunes for approval. Now when I test the app I found out a strange behavior which I think should be rectified. When I launch app first time, the app launched and when I press home button it closes but when I tap the app icon to open it again it opens where it was last closed.
How can I change the view to first view of the app when it's launched after closing by Home screen button?
If you don't want your app to run in the background you need to set the "Application does not run in background" key in the info.plist file. This means that your app will completely restart every time your user returns to it. Take time to decide if this really is the best move for your app. Allowing users to return to where they left off or remembering information about the last session can be a big plus.
If you do not set the info.plist value like I mention above you can manage the way your app behaves by using the: applicationWillEnterForeground: in UIApplicationDelegate or you could observe UIApplicationWillEnterForegroundNotifications. Read up on all the available notifications and methods available for this in the UIApplication Delegate documentation.